Posts tagged Satellite

While the Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977, cruises into interstellar space (the farthest man-made object from Earth) and missions like New Horizons capture snaps from the outskirts of the solar system, we've been keeping the heavy hitters close to home. Massive space telescopes that scan the cos...

While there are plenty of TVs available with built-in Freesat, the satellite-based alternative to Freeview, set-top boxes aren't going anywhere soon. Freesat and hardware partner Humax haven't released a new model in several years, though, so it's time for a fresh box to attract new, subscription-...

Virgin America has announced that it's teaming up with satellite internet company ViaSat to provide the fastest in-flight WiFi of any commercial carrier. The new system uses a hybrid Ku-/Ka-band receiver to deliver an internet pipeline eight to 10 times faster than anything else on the market. The...

Most of us use Facebook to show off a new car, an engagement or a particularly notable lunch, but Mark Zuckerberg does it a bit differently. In a Q&amp;A session yesterday Zuckerberg referenced his company's plans for using lasers to connect more areas to the internet, and today he posted a few de...

The days of staying offline during your international flights might be coming to an end. Honeywell and Inmarsat have successfully stress-tested their global Ka-band satellite internet access in mid-air, doing everything from streaming YouTube videos to holding conference calls. The dry run shows t...

For most of the past two decades, a handful of climate change scientists have had the CIA's MEDEA (Measurement of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis) program as an ace in the hole: they could draw on classified info from spy satellites and subs to study global warming in extreme detail. Howeve...

Planetary Resources hasn't had much success getting its asteroid-mining business off the ground, in a very literal sense -- it lost its first satellite, Arkyd-3, in the Antares rocket explosion last year. It's about to get a second try, though. The Larry Page-backed company has announced that its...

It's been a long and hard road for NASA's Messenger Probe as it studied the surface of Mercury for the last four years. That journey, however, will come to an end today, after NASA announced that the craft will crash land into the planet at around 3:30pm ET today. The vehicle was the first that ma...

You may not be familiar with United Launch Alliance, but it's about to handle a large chunk of US space launches -- and that makes the rocket you see above particularly important. That's Vulcan, ULA's newly unveiled launch system for satellites and similar payloads. The two-stage vehicle is design...

Rocket Lab is a Lockheed Martin-funded startup that dreams of taking small satellites to space for an affordable price -- but it wants to do so using technology quite different than usual. See, the company has revealed that its engine called the "Rutherford" is (1) composed mostly of 3D-printed pa...

We haven't seen many updates for DirecTV's streaming services in a while, but this week it added a slew of new channels for customers to watch live even when they're away from home. The 22 additions include MTV, TNT, Nickelodeon, BET, Cartoon Network and more ready for viewing on computers, tablet...

In an awkward twist on AT&amp;T's proposed purchase of DirecTV, now both companies are in hot water with the FTC. The Federal Trade Commission sued AT&amp;T a few months ago over its data throttling, and today charged DirecTV with deceptive advertising -- an accusation DirecTV calls "flat-out wron...